Original slides of the Man on the moon appear in an old drawer

This is an article for curious people. A NASA worker recently found in a desk drawer a box with a rather striking inscription "Film captured on the moon". What was his surprise when he opened it and discovered that it was nothing more or less than several rolls with fragments of 70mm film belonging to the mission of Apollo 15, during which images of the manned moon landing made by the Americans were taken. satelite.

It is not about unpublished images, but it serves as a curious example of how graphic information was formerly treated, and how easily it can be forgotten.

The Apollo missions carried half-format 70mm Hasselblad cameras loaded with Ektachrome slide film (the same one that Kodak will bring back to the market later this year) of different sensitivities, although according to Jon C. Haverstick, the photographer who has taken charge of digitize the film, this one in particular is thinner than normal, something that could possibly be explained in that way they could add more film length to the same roll occupying the same space and thus take more advantage of each load, since changing the film during a lunar mission, it could be quite cumbersome.

The slides were digitized using a light table, a printed support for the occasion with a 3D printer and a Nikon D810 DSLR / 105mm, since the common medium format film scanners are not suitable for digitizing 70mm film.

The result is quite good, and in it we can see, in addition to the Austranauts who starred in the landing of Apollo 15, the lunar module - called "Falcon" (LM-10) - and the Lunar Rover (LR) the vehicle used by the astronauts to navigate the satellite during their expedition.